Explores the immersive quality of abuse and trauma—to show physically/materially via apparatus ma... more Explores the immersive quality of abuse and trauma—to show physically/materially via apparatus manipulation what is invisible in pure digital form. This evolved into body performance & sound poetry to drive both the flicker and manipulating events from both digital & analog projectors, using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches. Performed in Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Shanghai, Tokyo, Karlsruhe (Germany), London, Brighton (UK), Auckland, Christchurch (NZ)
Framed by Vilem Flusser’s “Freedom of the Migrant” & “technical image” and marked a dialogue between analog and digital forms. I understood my migration from old to new technologies as an echo/replay/rehearsal of my parent’s physical migration from the old world (Europe) to the new world (Australia).
Framed by Chris Brewin’s traumatic memory model: a disturbed dialogue between Verbally Accesible Memory (VAM) and Situational Accessible memory (SAM)
Traum A Dream 6' 52" (Published 2002)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I... more Traum A Dream 6' 52" (Published 2002)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life and the fragmented remembering of abuse from childhood at the hands of my grand-mother and aunts from my father's side of the family in the Netherlands, before my parents and I migrated to Australia in 1958. Please read "Dys-membering Traum A Dream" in the articles section.
Traum A Dream attempts to visually work through fragmented traumatic memories. I believe my own emphasis is both visceral and visual, articulated through a materialist aesthetic, located in relation to the film work of Peter Gidal, Kurt Kren, Marc Adrian and Robert Breer, amongst others. In this project, my interest in avant-garde film is about the methodologies that express the mechanism of denial and erasure of trauma. It is about framing and conveying such abuse's hidden ‘un-speakability'.
Phase 1: 2-screen Experiments 50 minutes 1981+
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in... more Phase 1: 2-screen Experiments 50 minutes 1981+
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in Suburban Melbourne & their impact on family life. Flicker, afterimages, chants, rants and repetitions, framed by Mcluhan’s theorizing about probes, pattern recognition, information speed-up. The visuals were structured around the sonic qualities of the performance spaces.
Phase 2: 3- 6 projector performances 2000+
The immersive quality of abuse and trauma presented physically & materially by rendering the production apparatus visible. Body performance, shadow play & sound poetry driving the flicker and manipulations using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches.
Phase 3: 360 degree projections.
A response to Covid. 360 degree projection spaces like fulldome enable an exploration of peripheral vision & shift the impact on the body of these immersive environments.
This proposal focuses on a 24 hour surveillance time-lapse of the iconic Flinders Street Railway ... more This proposal focuses on a 24 hour surveillance time-lapse of the iconic Flinders Street Railway Station in Melbourne. This work is related to a 16mm documentary on the station, On Time, made by the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1953, 70 years earlier.
24 Hour Clocks is an experimental documentary about Surveillance and the iconic Flinders Street Station in Melbourne that marks the shift from material analogue technologies associated with the British Empire and its Colonies into the contemporary digital. The presentation contrasts the 1950s role of servicing and regulating the proletariat workers through to the Station’s present tourist destination. The presentation reviews the Station’s more precarious diminished role in a diversified networked city permeated by ephemeral digital technologies and a COVID legacy.
The presentation contrasts this visible surveillance with the 1,000s of surveillance cameras littering the city and the mobile cameras carried by all those traversing this physical space on foot. The presentation analyses how these shifts in technology articulate the transformation of class structures within the local economy and documents the shift from a Proletariat Class into the Precariat. Reference will also be made to an earlier documentary, Found Found Found, discussed in and available in NECSUS in 2014.
"'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is a... more "'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is an examination of decay and forgetting, where what both distance and time can bring to one's private feelings of belonging and home. Highly immersed in a fragmented and disjointed haptic space of its own materiality, this film stutters out its thoughts frame by frame" - Steven Ball, 'Mesh' 3, Autumn 1994, p.23
With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using n... more With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art examines the capacity of an artist’s cinema of experimental and avant-garde film to perform and communicate traumatic experience. De Bruyn analyses key films from the 1940s to the present that perform aspects of overwhelming experience through their approach, structure, content and perceptual impact, mapping a trajectory from analogue to contemporary digital moving image practice. He argues for the inclusion of Peter Gidal’s 1970s conception of ‘materialist film’ into the genre of ‘trauma cinema’ through its capacity to articulate un-locatability and perceptually perform dis-orientation and a flashback effect, all further identified here as key characteristics of digital moving image practice. The discussion explores the following questions. Can ‘materialist film’ model traumatic memory and perform the traumatic flashback? Does the capacity to articulate trauma’s un-speakability and invisibility give this practice a renewed relevance in digital media’s preoccupation with surface and the impact of information overload? De Bruyn’s phenomenological ‘traumatic’ reading of materialist film steps beyond Gidal’s original anti-illusionist rationale to incorporate critiques effectively mounted against it by the founders of a ‘70s feminist psychoanalytic counter-cinema. This contemporary re-reading further re-evaluates the Minimalist turn in painting and sculpture after the Second World War, arguing that this development is not essentialist or visionary but makes visible the implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure at the core of traumatic remembering. For de Bruyn, the initial traumatic impact of industrialization on the body’s perceptual apparatus, traceable through the advent of cinema and train travel, is communicated by such moving image art. The development of digital technology marks a new cycle of such perceptual re-balancing for which materialist film is uniquely positioned and which it critically addresses.
This film re-animates stereoscopic images of Melbourne from the 1920s. Technically the film makes... more This film re-animates stereoscopic images of Melbourne from the 1920s. Technically the film makes a statement about how each new iteration of moving image technology reclaims artifacts and gestures from the past. Such an archeology enables the viewer to approach these images in new ways. Further, just as the image has become unstable so have our beliefs. Living in the Past recycles Jethro Tull’s lyrics to indicate that we no longer understand the political situation we live in. This work researches the nature of stereoscopic vision and tests out how easily small changes to an image are picked up up at the centre and periphery of an image. In this way it is involved in research into pattern recognition.
Render: The annual journal of Creative Australian animation, Number one. October , 2015
One Complete Revolution, a 10-minute black and white animation by Melbourne animator Noel Richard... more One Complete Revolution, a 10-minute black and white animation by Melbourne animator Noel Richards is an important achievement in the jigsaw of Australian animation history and an important signpost in the evolution of technique. It was completed in 1989 and screened at the 1990 Melbourne International Film Festival. This film, largely unknown and invisible since its initial release, implicitly documents shifts in animation technique and reflexively references cinema's history and its evolving language inside its narrative. As a mixed media work, One Complete Revolution straddles the shift from analog to digital animation. As an early piece of computer animation, Richards devised a form of computer assisted rotoscoping and fashioned a rudimentary form of compositing, before that term was in general use, predicting compositing's ascendancy in digital art and commercial use. The film's narrative is inspired by Berthold Bartosch's The Idea (1932) (25 minutes), nominated by Richards as an influence and which itself was based on the woodcuts of Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel (1889-1972). In turn Masereel's 'wordless novels' which included The Idea (1920) are considered a precursor to the contemporary Graphic Novel and is cited by Art Spiegelman as an influence on his serialised seminal Graphic Maus (1980-91), which introduced the form globally. Pin-board animator Alexandre Alexeieff, a friend of Bartosch, described his 1932 animation as 'Serious, historical, poetic', to stress the adult philosophical subject of the film, a far cry from the cartoon animation for children in which animation has often been pigeon holed. This philosophical and historic emphasis is also true of One Complete Revolution. Richard's narrative begins with a cloaked woman walking from the horizon line of a barren windswept landscape towards the camera. She passes Sisyphus on her way to a modern skyscraper metropolis. This sets up the narrative; in Greek mythology Sisyphus was fated to move a boulder up a hill and to then witness it roll back down again. This was his eternal plight, as punishment for his deft political trickery. For Albert Camus Sisyphus was a modern absurdist hero. Like Camus, Richards' Sisyphus also frames the repetitive, mundane ambiguous, manipulative and duplicitous nature of contemporary daily life. Richard's Sisyphus is not enslaved to a boulder but is presented as a naked athletic black figure who continually turns a wheel for no apparent purpose. On reaching the city the traveller observes a city in political turmoil, dominated by large public screens that speed through fragments of news and corporate advertising, screens continually observed by an entranced populace in groups on the street. As is also typical of Australia's postwar migrants and refugees to the present-day, our metaphorical traveller is lucky enough to get a demeaning menial job as a cleaner. She ends up cleaning the tomb of an important political figure. The film demonstrates how this ideologue's political manifestoes become institutionalised through rallies, speeches and most importantly how his 'ideal' text is incorporated through bureaucratic means, before the disappointed traveller eventually leaves the city exhausted. The traveller passes Sisyphus once again. It seems she has set up her own eternal repetition, migrating from one metropolis to another.
Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the aesthetics of process at a number of leve... more Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the aesthetics of process at a number of levels. At the core of these performances are several of three- or four-screen, essentially abstract films of the same duration which comment upon and echo each other in a constant interplay of flicker-like positive and negative imagery. The soundtrack of the films works in a related way: the same or similar words and sound fragments are overlayed, or are repeated in an absurd call-and-answer pattern running from one speaker to another. This overall design or formal system is then set into play and relativised in the live event through a number of treatment-techniques. Reels are placed out of order or interspliced with other short films or fragments of found footage or tests, the bulb of one or more projectors can be occasionally turned off while the soundtrack continues, or the projector can be stopped altogether, extending, stretching out or disrupting completely the apparent synchrony bet...
Though still a relatively recent activity, working with the moving image in the digital age has a... more Though still a relatively recent activity, working with the moving image in the digital age has a history. This record resides in an evolving cultural process of looking that Bacon identifies above. It can also be referenced back to that non-narrative tradition of the moving image that runs through experimental film and video production. Although that is a practice that has become problematic in Australian conditions, an experimental / "avant-garde" tradition of film and video art continues internationally to offer critical ways of articulating the human condition, especially at those margins at which such an oppositional practice itself tends to be situated. Canada, a place with which Australia shares many parallels, offers a continuing, lively tradition in this area. Mike Hoolboom's Tom (2002 75 minutes, Video) showcasing the practice of Gay HIV+ New York Film Artist Tom Chomont, is presented here as exemplar evidence of such a continuing spirit. Tom, created using digital technologies, can be considered in terms of both old and new media. It is a work that has been historically informed by the work of a previous generation, like the work of film artists Al Razutis and Jack Chambers. This is a connection that will be examined further to underline the regenerative resilience of Canadian moving image art. What this ongoing tradition offers a contemporary digital practice is a fully formed mastery over technique and an articulate, mature language that speaks directly to the viewer.
This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career span... more This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career spans the late 1960s to the present. His notoriously dissident and innovative feature length work The Mystical Rose (1976, 65 minutes) is the primary focus, the fulcrum point of this analysis, and balanced by a review of his earlier shorter formative films, his cultural milieu, the thinkers that shaped his youth and particularly his changing relation to the Catholic Church. His relationship with Christianity has gone full circle through a critical rejection, worked through in The Mystical Rose, to a re-embrace in his later films Turnaround (1983, 60 mins) and The Contemplation of the Cross (1989, 27 minutes). This trajectory is understood here in relation to Magic Realism, Michael Bakhtin's conception of the 'Carnivalesque' and Surrealism. What is of particular interest historically for animation is Lee's pioneering and innovative combination of animation with live action documentation, conveying both inner and outer realities, and mapping the relationships between them.
Paul Sharits (1943-93) was an American film artist, a proponent of what Peter Gidal, P. Adams Sit... more Paul Sharits (1943-93) was an American film artist, a proponent of what Peter Gidal, P. Adams Sitney, and Anette Michelson referred to as structural film. This 60’s avant-garde film movement foregrounded a film’s structure ahead of its content. Sharits trained as a graphic artist and painter. His 16mm films were concerned with flicker, and abstract light plays that created visceral perceptual effects both in sound and image that have been taken up more recently in the expanded proto-cinema of Bruce McLure. These films were often multi-projector. Shutter Interface (1975) Consists of four 16mm projectors with four soundtracks on a continuous loop. His flicker films include Ray Gun Virus, Piece Mandala/End War, N:O:T:H:I:N:G and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, which are the main focus of this discussion.
As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial ma... more As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial materialist (formalist) cinema this paper contextualises the recycling and re-samplings of mainstream industrial cinema that I have recently undertaken. I aim to place this practice within emerging discourses of hybridity, crossing-borders and a Global Cinema. This research speaks to my earliest experiences of migration into Australia, of becoming Australian, unfolding in my 50s childhood and enunciates the pressures my parents’ migration placed on them. The focus of this work articulates the somewhat emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant (CAB 1948) of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced.
I voice my sampling and re-editing practices via a 1970s experimental filmmaking in which I initiated my filmmaking practice, an outsider move I now understand as a return, as re-performing my parent’s marginality in this culture. I particularly resource Peter Gidal’s 70s manifestation of materialist film (see Gidal 1989), subjugated and considered utopian and apolitical within Peter Wollen’s two avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]) but which I have argued elsewhere returns in the digital situation of information overload and image hyper-malleability to express the impact and structure of traumatic experience (de Bruyn 2012). Having finally arrived as an Australian, I reclaim my parent’s history by relating the history of my subjugated practice. I offer aspects of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as evidence of materialist film’s recall internationally, as examples of a dialogue and re-integration of the avant-garde split that Wollen imagined and facilitated, and a method for unpacking the traumatic register of the 1950s New Australian identity. In the last part of this paper Arnold’s method is used to reveal the ideologies impacting on the newly arrived migrant in the 50s. This textual analysis is performed in the re-editing of mainstream film material relating to this period of Australian history.
Dirk de Bruyn 1 This group further participated in Sydney's alternative artist collective The Yel... more Dirk de Bruyn 1 This group further participated in Sydney's alternative artist collective The Yellow House from 1970 to 1973 through multimedia events, light-shows, workshops and screenings. The Yellow House was initiated by Martin Sharp on his return to Australia from London. His notoriety rested on his involvement with OZ magazine. Sharp's psychedelia also created Cream's Desreali Gears record cover. Sharp is considered an infl uence and antecedent to the artists behind the irreverent Mambo Graphics clothing label. In 2000 the Mambo style was showcased in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, through Reg Mombassa's cartoon-like sculptures that are also reminiscent of Robert Crumb's cartoon style.
International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 2021
Max Hattler’s short abstract animations demonstrate an awareness of the form’s historic 1920’s Eu... more Max Hattler’s short abstract animations demonstrate an awareness of the form’s historic 1920’s European Animation precedents, is informed by the structurally focused minimalism of the 60’s and re-tools pre-cinema toys. Yet his work speaks to the contemporary technological environment he occupies and experiences directly. His move to Hong Kong and his recent Serial Parallels is also a predictive probe into future media environments. Hattler’s digital architectures are designed to make sense of the technological situation of speed and information overload which Vilem Flusser marks as amnesic and Marshall McLuhan identifies as an acoustic space readable through pattern recognition. His practice makes productive use of the flexible and modular qualities of contemporary digital image-making technologies for both production and publication purposes.
Tango (1980, 8 mins) is an animated film that was completed at the Se-ma-for studio (Studio Małyc... more Tango (1980, 8 mins) is an animated film that was completed at the Se-ma-for studio (Studio Małych Form Filmowych – Studio of Small Film Forms) in Łódź by Zbigniew Rybczyński. It was the first Polish Oscar winner in the animation category in 1982 and catapulted Rybczyński on a successful journey into the frontier of emerging technologies of new media in both the United States and Germany. Rybczyński produced numerous films and music videos in the 1980s and 90s in the new emerging media and developed innovative electronic imaging technologies used in film and television for which he holds a number of patents. Media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Vilem Flusser and Peter Weibel have been enlisted here to frame the technological changes envisioned in Tango. Tango sits at a historic fulcrum in the shift from analog to digital media, which Flusser mapped on to the rise to the technical image and McLuhan described as a shift from visual to acoustic space. This shift privileges post-Euclidean geometry, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This paper puts forward the innovative Tango as a case study in a paradigm shift from analog to digital short filmmaking.
American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving
animations ‘research’ the perce... more American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving
animations ‘research’ the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first
visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).
These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the con... more These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the construction of my short film Traum A Dream (Australia 6 minutes 2003) that was shown at the 2004 Double Dialogues Conference. This exercise thus places me in that terrain, that double dialogue between theory and practice. As both artist and commentator it also threatens to catch me hovering in that no-man’s land between the written word about the art and the artefact itself, judging my own folly.
This essay examines Neil Taylor’s (1945-) animations, situated between the moving image, performa... more This essay examines Neil Taylor’s (1945-) animations, situated between the moving image, performance and sculpture and in the shadows of his recognised wire-based sculptural practice. Taylor’s animations automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks and note pads, (Short Lives 1980-90) cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990) and are enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ (Copy Copy 1998) designed to shape this idiosyncratic activity. These short films are part of an avant-garde project ‘that continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film.’ (John Hanhardt, 1976: 44). Taylor’s practice is additionally placed, through Vilem Flusser’s ‘technical image’ in relation to the ascendancy of digital culture, and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ is used to frame both Taylor’s art and teaching practice, in order to examine the discounting of the technical classes that these fields of production consistently perform.
This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads... more This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.
Explores the immersive quality of abuse and trauma—to show physically/materially via apparatus ma... more Explores the immersive quality of abuse and trauma—to show physically/materially via apparatus manipulation what is invisible in pure digital form. This evolved into body performance & sound poetry to drive both the flicker and manipulating events from both digital & analog projectors, using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches. Performed in Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Shanghai, Tokyo, Karlsruhe (Germany), London, Brighton (UK), Auckland, Christchurch (NZ)
Framed by Vilem Flusser’s “Freedom of the Migrant” & “technical image” and marked a dialogue between analog and digital forms. I understood my migration from old to new technologies as an echo/replay/rehearsal of my parent’s physical migration from the old world (Europe) to the new world (Australia).
Framed by Chris Brewin’s traumatic memory model: a disturbed dialogue between Verbally Accesible Memory (VAM) and Situational Accessible memory (SAM)
Traum A Dream 6' 52" (Published 2002)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I... more Traum A Dream 6' 52" (Published 2002)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life and the fragmented remembering of abuse from childhood at the hands of my grand-mother and aunts from my father's side of the family in the Netherlands, before my parents and I migrated to Australia in 1958. Please read "Dys-membering Traum A Dream" in the articles section.
Traum A Dream attempts to visually work through fragmented traumatic memories. I believe my own emphasis is both visceral and visual, articulated through a materialist aesthetic, located in relation to the film work of Peter Gidal, Kurt Kren, Marc Adrian and Robert Breer, amongst others. In this project, my interest in avant-garde film is about the methodologies that express the mechanism of denial and erasure of trauma. It is about framing and conveying such abuse's hidden ‘un-speakability'.
Phase 1: 2-screen Experiments 50 minutes 1981+
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in... more Phase 1: 2-screen Experiments 50 minutes 1981+
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in Suburban Melbourne & their impact on family life. Flicker, afterimages, chants, rants and repetitions, framed by Mcluhan’s theorizing about probes, pattern recognition, information speed-up. The visuals were structured around the sonic qualities of the performance spaces.
Phase 2: 3- 6 projector performances 2000+
The immersive quality of abuse and trauma presented physically & materially by rendering the production apparatus visible. Body performance, shadow play & sound poetry driving the flicker and manipulations using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches.
Phase 3: 360 degree projections.
A response to Covid. 360 degree projection spaces like fulldome enable an exploration of peripheral vision & shift the impact on the body of these immersive environments.
This proposal focuses on a 24 hour surveillance time-lapse of the iconic Flinders Street Railway ... more This proposal focuses on a 24 hour surveillance time-lapse of the iconic Flinders Street Railway Station in Melbourne. This work is related to a 16mm documentary on the station, On Time, made by the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1953, 70 years earlier.
24 Hour Clocks is an experimental documentary about Surveillance and the iconic Flinders Street Station in Melbourne that marks the shift from material analogue technologies associated with the British Empire and its Colonies into the contemporary digital. The presentation contrasts the 1950s role of servicing and regulating the proletariat workers through to the Station’s present tourist destination. The presentation reviews the Station’s more precarious diminished role in a diversified networked city permeated by ephemeral digital technologies and a COVID legacy.
The presentation contrasts this visible surveillance with the 1,000s of surveillance cameras littering the city and the mobile cameras carried by all those traversing this physical space on foot. The presentation analyses how these shifts in technology articulate the transformation of class structures within the local economy and documents the shift from a Proletariat Class into the Precariat. Reference will also be made to an earlier documentary, Found Found Found, discussed in and available in NECSUS in 2014.
"'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is a... more "'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is an examination of decay and forgetting, where what both distance and time can bring to one's private feelings of belonging and home. Highly immersed in a fragmented and disjointed haptic space of its own materiality, this film stutters out its thoughts frame by frame" - Steven Ball, 'Mesh' 3, Autumn 1994, p.23
With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using n... more With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art examines the capacity of an artist’s cinema of experimental and avant-garde film to perform and communicate traumatic experience. De Bruyn analyses key films from the 1940s to the present that perform aspects of overwhelming experience through their approach, structure, content and perceptual impact, mapping a trajectory from analogue to contemporary digital moving image practice. He argues for the inclusion of Peter Gidal’s 1970s conception of ‘materialist film’ into the genre of ‘trauma cinema’ through its capacity to articulate un-locatability and perceptually perform dis-orientation and a flashback effect, all further identified here as key characteristics of digital moving image practice. The discussion explores the following questions. Can ‘materialist film’ model traumatic memory and perform the traumatic flashback? Does the capacity to articulate trauma’s un-speakability and invisibility give this practice a renewed relevance in digital media’s preoccupation with surface and the impact of information overload? De Bruyn’s phenomenological ‘traumatic’ reading of materialist film steps beyond Gidal’s original anti-illusionist rationale to incorporate critiques effectively mounted against it by the founders of a ‘70s feminist psychoanalytic counter-cinema. This contemporary re-reading further re-evaluates the Minimalist turn in painting and sculpture after the Second World War, arguing that this development is not essentialist or visionary but makes visible the implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure at the core of traumatic remembering. For de Bruyn, the initial traumatic impact of industrialization on the body’s perceptual apparatus, traceable through the advent of cinema and train travel, is communicated by such moving image art. The development of digital technology marks a new cycle of such perceptual re-balancing for which materialist film is uniquely positioned and which it critically addresses.
This film re-animates stereoscopic images of Melbourne from the 1920s. Technically the film makes... more This film re-animates stereoscopic images of Melbourne from the 1920s. Technically the film makes a statement about how each new iteration of moving image technology reclaims artifacts and gestures from the past. Such an archeology enables the viewer to approach these images in new ways. Further, just as the image has become unstable so have our beliefs. Living in the Past recycles Jethro Tull’s lyrics to indicate that we no longer understand the political situation we live in. This work researches the nature of stereoscopic vision and tests out how easily small changes to an image are picked up up at the centre and periphery of an image. In this way it is involved in research into pattern recognition.
Render: The annual journal of Creative Australian animation, Number one. October , 2015
One Complete Revolution, a 10-minute black and white animation by Melbourne animator Noel Richard... more One Complete Revolution, a 10-minute black and white animation by Melbourne animator Noel Richards is an important achievement in the jigsaw of Australian animation history and an important signpost in the evolution of technique. It was completed in 1989 and screened at the 1990 Melbourne International Film Festival. This film, largely unknown and invisible since its initial release, implicitly documents shifts in animation technique and reflexively references cinema's history and its evolving language inside its narrative. As a mixed media work, One Complete Revolution straddles the shift from analog to digital animation. As an early piece of computer animation, Richards devised a form of computer assisted rotoscoping and fashioned a rudimentary form of compositing, before that term was in general use, predicting compositing's ascendancy in digital art and commercial use. The film's narrative is inspired by Berthold Bartosch's The Idea (1932) (25 minutes), nominated by Richards as an influence and which itself was based on the woodcuts of Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel (1889-1972). In turn Masereel's 'wordless novels' which included The Idea (1920) are considered a precursor to the contemporary Graphic Novel and is cited by Art Spiegelman as an influence on his serialised seminal Graphic Maus (1980-91), which introduced the form globally. Pin-board animator Alexandre Alexeieff, a friend of Bartosch, described his 1932 animation as 'Serious, historical, poetic', to stress the adult philosophical subject of the film, a far cry from the cartoon animation for children in which animation has often been pigeon holed. This philosophical and historic emphasis is also true of One Complete Revolution. Richard's narrative begins with a cloaked woman walking from the horizon line of a barren windswept landscape towards the camera. She passes Sisyphus on her way to a modern skyscraper metropolis. This sets up the narrative; in Greek mythology Sisyphus was fated to move a boulder up a hill and to then witness it roll back down again. This was his eternal plight, as punishment for his deft political trickery. For Albert Camus Sisyphus was a modern absurdist hero. Like Camus, Richards' Sisyphus also frames the repetitive, mundane ambiguous, manipulative and duplicitous nature of contemporary daily life. Richard's Sisyphus is not enslaved to a boulder but is presented as a naked athletic black figure who continually turns a wheel for no apparent purpose. On reaching the city the traveller observes a city in political turmoil, dominated by large public screens that speed through fragments of news and corporate advertising, screens continually observed by an entranced populace in groups on the street. As is also typical of Australia's postwar migrants and refugees to the present-day, our metaphorical traveller is lucky enough to get a demeaning menial job as a cleaner. She ends up cleaning the tomb of an important political figure. The film demonstrates how this ideologue's political manifestoes become institutionalised through rallies, speeches and most importantly how his 'ideal' text is incorporated through bureaucratic means, before the disappointed traveller eventually leaves the city exhausted. The traveller passes Sisyphus once again. It seems she has set up her own eternal repetition, migrating from one metropolis to another.
Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the aesthetics of process at a number of leve... more Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the aesthetics of process at a number of levels. At the core of these performances are several of three- or four-screen, essentially abstract films of the same duration which comment upon and echo each other in a constant interplay of flicker-like positive and negative imagery. The soundtrack of the films works in a related way: the same or similar words and sound fragments are overlayed, or are repeated in an absurd call-and-answer pattern running from one speaker to another. This overall design or formal system is then set into play and relativised in the live event through a number of treatment-techniques. Reels are placed out of order or interspliced with other short films or fragments of found footage or tests, the bulb of one or more projectors can be occasionally turned off while the soundtrack continues, or the projector can be stopped altogether, extending, stretching out or disrupting completely the apparent synchrony bet...
Though still a relatively recent activity, working with the moving image in the digital age has a... more Though still a relatively recent activity, working with the moving image in the digital age has a history. This record resides in an evolving cultural process of looking that Bacon identifies above. It can also be referenced back to that non-narrative tradition of the moving image that runs through experimental film and video production. Although that is a practice that has become problematic in Australian conditions, an experimental / "avant-garde" tradition of film and video art continues internationally to offer critical ways of articulating the human condition, especially at those margins at which such an oppositional practice itself tends to be situated. Canada, a place with which Australia shares many parallels, offers a continuing, lively tradition in this area. Mike Hoolboom's Tom (2002 75 minutes, Video) showcasing the practice of Gay HIV+ New York Film Artist Tom Chomont, is presented here as exemplar evidence of such a continuing spirit. Tom, created using digital technologies, can be considered in terms of both old and new media. It is a work that has been historically informed by the work of a previous generation, like the work of film artists Al Razutis and Jack Chambers. This is a connection that will be examined further to underline the regenerative resilience of Canadian moving image art. What this ongoing tradition offers a contemporary digital practice is a fully formed mastery over technique and an articulate, mature language that speaks directly to the viewer.
This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career span... more This essay explores the animation practice of Australian filmmaker Michael Lee, whose career spans the late 1960s to the present. His notoriously dissident and innovative feature length work The Mystical Rose (1976, 65 minutes) is the primary focus, the fulcrum point of this analysis, and balanced by a review of his earlier shorter formative films, his cultural milieu, the thinkers that shaped his youth and particularly his changing relation to the Catholic Church. His relationship with Christianity has gone full circle through a critical rejection, worked through in The Mystical Rose, to a re-embrace in his later films Turnaround (1983, 60 mins) and The Contemplation of the Cross (1989, 27 minutes). This trajectory is understood here in relation to Magic Realism, Michael Bakhtin's conception of the 'Carnivalesque' and Surrealism. What is of particular interest historically for animation is Lee's pioneering and innovative combination of animation with live action documentation, conveying both inner and outer realities, and mapping the relationships between them.
Paul Sharits (1943-93) was an American film artist, a proponent of what Peter Gidal, P. Adams Sit... more Paul Sharits (1943-93) was an American film artist, a proponent of what Peter Gidal, P. Adams Sitney, and Anette Michelson referred to as structural film. This 60’s avant-garde film movement foregrounded a film’s structure ahead of its content. Sharits trained as a graphic artist and painter. His 16mm films were concerned with flicker, and abstract light plays that created visceral perceptual effects both in sound and image that have been taken up more recently in the expanded proto-cinema of Bruce McLure. These films were often multi-projector. Shutter Interface (1975) Consists of four 16mm projectors with four soundtracks on a continuous loop. His flicker films include Ray Gun Virus, Piece Mandala/End War, N:O:T:H:I:N:G and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, which are the main focus of this discussion.
As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial ma... more As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial materialist (formalist) cinema this paper contextualises the recycling and re-samplings of mainstream industrial cinema that I have recently undertaken. I aim to place this practice within emerging discourses of hybridity, crossing-borders and a Global Cinema. This research speaks to my earliest experiences of migration into Australia, of becoming Australian, unfolding in my 50s childhood and enunciates the pressures my parents’ migration placed on them. The focus of this work articulates the somewhat emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant (CAB 1948) of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced.
I voice my sampling and re-editing practices via a 1970s experimental filmmaking in which I initiated my filmmaking practice, an outsider move I now understand as a return, as re-performing my parent’s marginality in this culture. I particularly resource Peter Gidal’s 70s manifestation of materialist film (see Gidal 1989), subjugated and considered utopian and apolitical within Peter Wollen’s two avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]) but which I have argued elsewhere returns in the digital situation of information overload and image hyper-malleability to express the impact and structure of traumatic experience (de Bruyn 2012). Having finally arrived as an Australian, I reclaim my parent’s history by relating the history of my subjugated practice. I offer aspects of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as evidence of materialist film’s recall internationally, as examples of a dialogue and re-integration of the avant-garde split that Wollen imagined and facilitated, and a method for unpacking the traumatic register of the 1950s New Australian identity. In the last part of this paper Arnold’s method is used to reveal the ideologies impacting on the newly arrived migrant in the 50s. This textual analysis is performed in the re-editing of mainstream film material relating to this period of Australian history.
Dirk de Bruyn 1 This group further participated in Sydney's alternative artist collective The Yel... more Dirk de Bruyn 1 This group further participated in Sydney's alternative artist collective The Yellow House from 1970 to 1973 through multimedia events, light-shows, workshops and screenings. The Yellow House was initiated by Martin Sharp on his return to Australia from London. His notoriety rested on his involvement with OZ magazine. Sharp's psychedelia also created Cream's Desreali Gears record cover. Sharp is considered an infl uence and antecedent to the artists behind the irreverent Mambo Graphics clothing label. In 2000 the Mambo style was showcased in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, through Reg Mombassa's cartoon-like sculptures that are also reminiscent of Robert Crumb's cartoon style.
International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 2021
Max Hattler’s short abstract animations demonstrate an awareness of the form’s historic 1920’s Eu... more Max Hattler’s short abstract animations demonstrate an awareness of the form’s historic 1920’s European Animation precedents, is informed by the structurally focused minimalism of the 60’s and re-tools pre-cinema toys. Yet his work speaks to the contemporary technological environment he occupies and experiences directly. His move to Hong Kong and his recent Serial Parallels is also a predictive probe into future media environments. Hattler’s digital architectures are designed to make sense of the technological situation of speed and information overload which Vilem Flusser marks as amnesic and Marshall McLuhan identifies as an acoustic space readable through pattern recognition. His practice makes productive use of the flexible and modular qualities of contemporary digital image-making technologies for both production and publication purposes.
Tango (1980, 8 mins) is an animated film that was completed at the Se-ma-for studio (Studio Małyc... more Tango (1980, 8 mins) is an animated film that was completed at the Se-ma-for studio (Studio Małych Form Filmowych – Studio of Small Film Forms) in Łódź by Zbigniew Rybczyński. It was the first Polish Oscar winner in the animation category in 1982 and catapulted Rybczyński on a successful journey into the frontier of emerging technologies of new media in both the United States and Germany. Rybczyński produced numerous films and music videos in the 1980s and 90s in the new emerging media and developed innovative electronic imaging technologies used in film and television for which he holds a number of patents. Media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Vilem Flusser and Peter Weibel have been enlisted here to frame the technological changes envisioned in Tango. Tango sits at a historic fulcrum in the shift from analog to digital media, which Flusser mapped on to the rise to the technical image and McLuhan described as a shift from visual to acoustic space. This shift privileges post-Euclidean geometry, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This paper puts forward the innovative Tango as a case study in a paradigm shift from analog to digital short filmmaking.
American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving
animations ‘research’ the perce... more American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving
animations ‘research’ the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first
visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).
These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the con... more These notes explore some of the background, the influences and pre-occupations at play in the construction of my short film Traum A Dream (Australia 6 minutes 2003) that was shown at the 2004 Double Dialogues Conference. This exercise thus places me in that terrain, that double dialogue between theory and practice. As both artist and commentator it also threatens to catch me hovering in that no-man’s land between the written word about the art and the artefact itself, judging my own folly.
This essay examines Neil Taylor’s (1945-) animations, situated between the moving image, performa... more This essay examines Neil Taylor’s (1945-) animations, situated between the moving image, performance and sculpture and in the shadows of his recognised wire-based sculptural practice. Taylor’s animations automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks and note pads, (Short Lives 1980-90) cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990) and are enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ (Copy Copy 1998) designed to shape this idiosyncratic activity. These short films are part of an avant-garde project ‘that continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film.’ (John Hanhardt, 1976: 44). Taylor’s practice is additionally placed, through Vilem Flusser’s ‘technical image’ in relation to the ascendancy of digital culture, and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ is used to frame both Taylor’s art and teaching practice, in order to examine the discounting of the technical classes that these fields of production consistently perform.
This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads... more This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.
The exhibition/art project will consisted of work by artists who have been through migration and ... more The exhibition/art project will consisted of work by artists who have been through migration and who, in their work, reflect upon issues of relocation/resettlement. The artworks were in the form of spatial (multi/mixed media) installations (and performances) aiming at visualizing migration experience and identification to achieve (new) contexts (and perspectives).
Isea 2013 Resistance Is Futile Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Arts, 2013
This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By rer... more This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By rereading Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle [1], in relation to the global Occupy movement and the rise of social media, we ask: in what ways does the proliferation of digital imagery enable and limit this recent form of political activism? By subjectively responding to selective quotations from Debord's writing, we link the triumvirate of global capitalism, public space and digital technology, producing commentary on the displacement imposed by contemporary 'spectacular' technologies, the networked 'technical image' and the politics of public space.
Homing in on the task of making documentaries interactive in the digital age requires quite the ... more Homing in on the task of making documentaries interactive in the digital age requires quite the opposite. It is about spreading out rather than targeting in. It is about ascribing the vessel that carries the content, the information. An understanding of the relationship between form and content is crucial to working effectively with an interactive medium.
ABSTRACT
This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. “Found ... more ABSTRACT
This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. “Found Found Found” NECSUS: Autumn, 2014. https://necsus-ejms.org/found-found-found/). Through a study of its formalist influences and strategies it is argued that it is possible to arrive at the audiovisual essay as a creative research methodology from a different practice trajectory. The originating point is the avant-garde split documented in Peter Wollen’s Two Avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]. “The two avant-gardes.” In Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, 92–114. London: Verso.), which articulated a formalist avant-garde, focusing on perceptual processes, as utopian in its extreme dismissal of the signified, as non-narrative and unreadable as political discourse. Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’ is enlisted to place such practice into a productive relationship with the audiovisual essay. This formalist cinema has already been re-read through the digital turn as producing forms of traumatic memory (de Bruyn [2014]. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.) and performing the formalist methods of surveillance technology (de Bruyn 2014. “Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival.” Senses of Cinema 70 March 2014: http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/festival-reports/structuralist-film-and-the-birth-of-surveillance-the-2013-alternativa-filmvideo-festival/.).
Violence in Film Conference Proceedings. Inter-Disciplinary.Net, London, England, 2009
This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning’s experimental narrative fil... more This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning’s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker’s ‘Trauma Cinema’, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper’s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein’s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify ‘unspeakable’ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein’s violent acts, rather than Protti’s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film’s structure and content.
A paper delivered in tandem with the short film Threshold (Dirk De Bruyn, 20 minutes, 2014), whic... more A paper delivered in tandem with the short film Threshold (Dirk De Bruyn, 20 minutes, 2014), which documents the history and childhood remembrances of the Geelong Waterfront using photographic material gleaned from the Geelong Heritage Centre, the Victorian State Library, the National Film and Sound Archive and Auckland War Memorial Museum alongside Google Maps.
Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running avant-garde and experimental Klm festival in North... more Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running avant-garde and experimental Klm festival in North America. 1963 was its foundation year. This year would bring 40 programs, and 180 films selected from 3,500 submitted from 100 countries. The festival shifted from purely 16mm a decade ago and retains a commitment to innovation in international moving image practice. Ann Arbor showcases Klms of all lengths and genres including experimental, animation, documentary, fiction, and performance-based works. It was voted #1 film festival (https://www.10best.com/awards/travel/best-Klm-festival-2019/) in North America in a USA Today reader's poll in 2019. Like all international artistic events this sustained profile offered no resistance to the Covid-19 virus.
SXSW’s 2020 program would have presented 135 feature films, including 99 world premieres, nine No... more SXSW’s 2020 program would have presented 135 feature films, including 99 world premieres, nine North American premieres, five US premieres, and 75 films from first-time filmmakers. There would have been 119 short films including music videos, 12 episodic premieres, seven special events, 14 episodic pilots in two curated programs, 30 title design entries and 27 virtual cinema projects. While none of the films or works played to an audience, films in competition were still screened to the juries, who bestowed prizes on the films they deemed best in their respective categories.
The 48th Edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam is IFFR director Bero Beyer’s fo... more The 48th Edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam is IFFR director Bero Beyer’s fourth iteration. The four program groupings remain in place with special themes in the Perspectives series, discovery in Bright Futures, high profile screenings in Voices and with the innovation of Deep Focus addressing a cinephile audience. This quadrant is useful in unpacking a cluttered and manifold program, with the IFFR app enabling decisions and changes to be made with agility. There was a slight attendance downturn from over 330,000 to 327,000 from 2018. Locals remained catered for with homegrown films, Dutch language screenings, ‘best of’ marathons and special audience days.
Jean-Gabriel Périot’s feature-length documentary A German Youth (2015) – showing at the Melbourne... more Jean-Gabriel Périot’s feature-length documentary A German Youth (2015) – showing at the Melbourne International Film Festival – maps the Red Army Faction’s (RAF) metamorphosis from student protest movement and left-wing political origins to what the state called a “terrorist organisation”.
This story is told through a cavalcade of media forms that is of itself of interest as predictive of our media-saturated daily lives. Student protest in the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for women’s rights occurred on a number of fronts in the West but with a particular twist in occupied postwar Germany.
Peter Tammer’s Fear of the Dark (1985) is partly a fictional exploration and re-enactment of the ... more Peter Tammer’s Fear of the Dark (1985) is partly a fictional exploration and re-enactment of the process of murder and violent intent. It is also part Cinéma vérité documentary of actor Robert Ratti’s daily life. We witness Ratti’s vicissitudes of searching and touting for work and his concerns about the scripted performances that bookend the film. These performances are the brutal shooting of a victim in his home and ends with the re-enacted murder of an abducted child. In light of the current media and cultural attention on male perpetrated family and sexual violence, Fear of the Dark is a film worth re-examining as it plumbs deep into the male’s psyche.
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film in Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, October 2003, 2003
Arthur Lipsett’s N-Zone is the longest, loosest and last of the collage films he produced at Cana... more Arthur Lipsett’s N-Zone is the longest, loosest and last of the collage films he produced at Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). It marks the end-point of his trajectory from feted young genius to discarded problem child/eccentric within the NFB. Lipsett’s N-Zone begs comparison as poor cousin to Chris Marker’s Zone in Sans Soleil (1982) and Tarkovsky’s in Stalker (1979).
Review of 'Azimuth' exhibition of photographic work by Daniel Armstrong and James McArdle at the ... more Review of 'Azimuth' exhibition of photographic work by Daniel Armstrong and James McArdle at the Phyllis Palmer Gallery in Bendigo from 27 July till 8 August, 2007
Article first Published in Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter in April 1997. Covers the presentat... more Article first Published in Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter in April 1997. Covers the presentation Of Cantrill's film Light Shards, their connection to Herbert Read's thinking on art in education, the consequent mentor Mary Matheson and the relation of this work to other local filmmakers Michael Lee, Tony Woods, Paul Winkler and Steven Ball
Tony Woods: Archive, edited by Andrew Gaynor and published locally in 2013, records the durabilit... more Tony Woods: Archive, edited by Andrew Gaynor and published locally in 2013, records the durability of the artist’s primary painting practice as will as his filmmkaing, a painting practice in which he has accrued a level of prestige over many years and changes of circumstance.
On her films:
Casa (Super 8 B+W, Col 4 minutes 1989),
The Little Things (Super 8 B+W, Col 5 min... more On her films: Casa (Super 8 B+W, Col 4 minutes 1989), The Little Things (Super 8 B+W, Col 5 minutes 1989) Embriato (Super 8 Colour 10 minutes1989), MRSOSO (Super 8 B+W, Col 10 minutes 1992) Sunset Aorta (Super 8 Colour 8 minutes 1993
Bill Mousoulis's 37 minute RE-prise of his Super 8 film making existence; tentatively named "When... more Bill Mousoulis's 37 minute RE-prise of his Super 8 film making existence; tentatively named "When I Grow Up" was shown at the last Melbou e Super 8 Group bpen Screening. Despite Bill's overexposed and inexorable output in both print and film, the film was a fresh and invigorating RE-emegence RE-constitution and REprieve.
Review of Abe Forsythe's Feature length Down Under, a tragi-comedy set in the aftermath of the Cr... more Review of Abe Forsythe's Feature length Down Under, a tragi-comedy set in the aftermath of the Cronulla Race Riots in Australia
AFW Screening Friday 22 February at 7.30 pm at Goodtime Studios (Basement, 746 Swanston Street, Carlton
Screening notes for a 2013 curated historic program of Regional and International 16mm films fore... more Screening notes for a 2013 curated historic program of Regional and International 16mm films foregrounding the material of film itself as part of its subject.
An Interview with Nick Zedd at the 1983 Ann Arbor Film Festival in Ann Arbor and in New York, dis... more An Interview with Nick Zedd at the 1983 Ann Arbor Film Festival in Ann Arbor and in New York, discussing his New York phenomenon. The Cinema of Transgression. it was published in 1986 in the Australian film publication Filmviews
This interview was conducted at Breer's teaching space at Cooper Union on a visit to New York fr... more This interview was conducted at Breer's teaching space at Cooper Union on a visit to New York from Australia to screen my own abstract work. it has not seen the light of day for 40 years when it was publixhed in the Modern Image Maker's Association newsletter.
I sat with Mike Hoolboom at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in January 2020, aft... more I sat with Mike Hoolboom at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in January 2020, after the premiere of Judy versus Capitalism (2020), an hour-long political bio of radical Canadian activist Judy Rebick. I had already seen the film online but was interested in the crowd reaction to the film given it was not a typical political documentary. I was also familiar, since the early ‘90s, with Hoolboom’s long history of engagement and prolific production with artist film culture.
Last year at IFFR, Hoolboom screened 27 Thoughts About my Father (2019), which features his own articulate ruminations on his father’s memory, who passed away in 2017. In Judy versus Capitalism, Judy Rebick’s stirring and personal voice drives the narrative and Hoolboom’s skills in shaping rhythm and organising his images to process emotion, developed over decades of film production, amplifies Judy’s story.
I am talking with Turkish filmmaker Köken Ergun at the Rotterdam International Film Festival abou... more I am talking with Turkish filmmaker Köken Ergun at the Rotterdam International Film Festival about a documentary that all Australian and New Zealand audiences should see. Heroes, commissioned by the Australian War Museum, is about the mythologizing of trauma, of the First World War campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula (or Çanakkale). Ergun includes interviews at the monuments with the April 25 pilgrims and tourists that reveal shared moments and differences. He follows the tour coaches where tour guides deliver their spiel. One side has John Simpson and his donkey, the other Corporal Seyit that turned back the British Fleet. A spectrum of emotions are played out here, from Nationalism to familial loss. The ANZAC fallen are respected as brothers, while other locals ruminate on why these tourist intruders are here; let them go back to where they came from. These opinions have an uncannily familiar ring to those that follow contemporary immigration debates in Australia.
Senses of Cinema, Dutch Experimental Film Dossier, Issue 34, February 2005
Dirk de Bruyn has been involved with personal film making as a practitioner, curator and writer i... more Dirk de Bruyn has been involved with personal film making as a practitioner, curator and writer in Melbourne and overseas for 30 years. He is currently teaching Digital Filmmaking at Deakin University. Curators and organisers, Anna Abrahams and Erwin van't Hart, members of the Filmbank, were responsible, with a group of colleagues, for bringing together and making accessible the history of Dutch experimental film. Two of their recent projects appeared at the 2004 Rotterdam International Film Festival: the D-Light screening program and the book MM2: Experimental Film in the Netherlands since 1960.
Melbourne Super 8 Newsletter Issue 122 (March 1997), 1997
This article begins my thinking on hunting down a melbourne Aesthetic in innovative filmmaking th... more This article begins my thinking on hunting down a melbourne Aesthetic in innovative filmmaking that has not been locked down/ identified. We live in a Global Village One of Mcluhan's Utopian millstones in the Age of the Technological Mush ROOM has been the "GLOBAL VILLAGE". It is a notion that seems to have found its home on the NET. It is a notion made of opposites. With "global" we conjure up the all-encompassing grand COLONISING : the corporate metaphor. And in "village" we detect the particular, the local touched by humanity. Depending on your point of view you can spin "global village" in any direction. It can mean whatever you want it to.. IS IT(?) a fluid metaphor liberated from the confines of language, or a slippery concept that cannot be pinned down?... A standing wave of contradiction that takes its pie and eats it too. Such indeterminate ideas have always motored capitalism, ideas that can give with one hand and take with the other, ideas where it is impossible to say under which shell the bean really is under. It is what Hitchcock plays with in his whodunits, it is behind the casino culture, the stock exchange, it is behind gold prospecting and mining, it is about the "next big thing" as Lennon used to call it. These tools of exploitation can open up disempowering situations. These are ideas that say one thing and effect another and it is you that is being taken away, abducted.
This piece, under the banner of "Manifestoes'" offers a historic trace of some politically orient... more This piece, under the banner of "Manifestoes'" offers a historic trace of some politically oriented work being made in Australia and specifically Melbourne, in the 80s.
This article is a hsitoric trace of the history of open screenings in Melbourne in the 1980's. Th... more This article is a hsitoric trace of the history of open screenings in Melbourne in the 1980's. The concept of the Open Screening has existed in film communities internationally since at least the sixties. They are BYO film/video events to which each filmmaker brings his/her own work and this is shown in the order in which it arrives. Every work is shown whether complete or incomplete, whether good or bad. There are no aesthetic decisions made by the organisers. It seems that audiences are made up of other filmmakers and their friends, although a following to such events does build up. A subculture evolves. The events are free and are held on a regular basis. They are easy to organise. There is no need for a high-profile public venue, no need to have programming deadlines and no need for a big publicity budget or publicity drive. Regularity, a room, some projection equipment, word of mouth, and a bit of a ring around is all that is needed.
Australian Retrospective 2012, URNI Films. ISBN: 978-0-9874537-0-9
These ‘historic’ notes on Australian Experimental Cinema offer some perspective on the marginal, ... more These ‘historic’ notes on Australian Experimental Cinema offer some perspective on the marginal, underground yet magically sustained project as adjunct to the historic program presented at KLEX in 2012.
These program notes offer up historic traces of Australian Alternative film from the 60s to the ... more These program notes offer up historic traces of Australian Alternative film from the 60s to the present. Although shot on 35mm, 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 this program was presented in Belgrade digitally. The selection covers four phases of avant-garde practice under Australian conditions. It samples a range from the re-emergence of the Australian film industry in the 70s when the experimental sat side by side with populist narrative and documentary (Fun Radio), through a parallel history with an international avant-garde and the increasing marginalization of the home product, witnessed locally through Cantrills Filmnotes (Leading Ladies, Contemplation of the Rose, Zoomfilm, Discs), through to an 80s re-emergence low budget super 8 artisinal production by a new generation of artists centred around communities such as the self-organised Melbourne Super 8 Film Group (Dolls, Excerpt, Morena, E.G.). This period included strategies of blowing up Super 8 to 35mm (E.G.), low budget home processing (Exacuate), automatic writing (Short Lives). Finally in the more contemporary phase some of these techniques and strategies were re-assembled for distribution in digital form (Traum A Dream, KeepinTime Abstract, Time Ball, WAP).
This program also reflects my history and presents a sprinkling of the films I experienced while I was making moving image works. Included are some of my own responses (Zoomfilm, Discs, Traum A Dream, WAP) to the marginal and invisible aesthetic and political situations I found myself in, where I was corralled with others, to eke out a creative low budget, low technology trajectory in what is and was considered a ‘lucky’ country.
Although there is a strong theme of abstraction and the materiality of film (Leading Ladies, Excerpt, Exacuate, KeepinTime Abstract) there are also works that sit at the edge of narrative (Fun Radio, Morena, E.G., WAP). These are the two avant-gardes, that for Peter Wollen were split in the 70s, but, I would argue, are re-integrated in the digital- if they ever were really that far apart. This program lists those methods of expression I had access to as a migrant in Australia. What I understand now is that I was looking for ways of articulating my exclusion viscerally and it was through methods, techniques and technologies demonstrated in these films that I needed to find it. I needed to understand and express how erasure and denial was exacted on my body in daily life. It is in this way I think that the abstract remains implicitly political.
A review revisiting Paul Winkler’s films 1964-94, a retrospective that was held at the Museum of ... more A review revisiting Paul Winkler’s films 1964-94, a retrospective that was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, July 7 – September 10, 1995.
Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter Issue 109 December 1995
A discussion of Steven Ball's Super 8 film practice particularly his Australian landscape work 19... more A discussion of Steven Ball's Super 8 film practice particularly his Australian landscape work 1989-95
Melbourne Super 8 Group Newsletter Issue 135 May 1998
Creative written piece for the Super 8 group newsletter, placing Super 8 practice in relation to ... more Creative written piece for the Super 8 group newsletter, placing Super 8 practice in relation to Situationism
Mebourne Super 8 Group Newsletter No 160 March 1998
A review of my deceased friend Lee Smith's curated program with notes on Marcus Bergner's Musical... more A review of my deceased friend Lee Smith's curated program with notes on Marcus Bergner's Musical Four Letters, The Cantrill's Waterfall and Lee's Tin Jan Istra.
Found Footage Magazine is an independent semi-annual publication distributed worldwide and printe... more Found Footage Magazine is an independent semi-annual publication distributed worldwide and printed both in English and Spanish. It offers theoretical, analytical and informative contents related to found footage film-making practices.
There is need for a recorded history - perhaps more than one is necessary to fully reveal the mul... more There is need for a recorded history - perhaps more than one is necessary to fully reveal the multi-layered identity of animation in Australia. With animation's becoming an accepted discipline for study and source for critical writing, it becomes important to define each country's history of its foundations and growth, whatever the significance, to identify each national animation in its subject and form, and to stimulate its capacity to survive as a vigorous medium both nationally and internationally. This certainly is not to deny the valuable contributions of others that have published invaluable Australian historical material based upon their original recordings of animators' visions (eg. Bradbury 2001; Quigley 2005; Monahan 1989; Bendazzi 1994). Yet a definitive history of Australian animation is unlikely to be constructed immediately. It is more likely that a future historian will sift through the data recorded by different researchers, thereby achieving a more comprehensive balance. It has been our wish to augment this data by recording through videoed interviews the recollections of those people still living from the earlier periods, and those of the contemporary animators. From these we would portray the work of the numerous smaller companies and independent animators, critically analysing particular films of significance, aiming to augment the existing account to a richer, fuller and more complex chronicle. We have thus far recorded over fifty videotaped interviews. With these, together with substantial archival research, we have commenced a series of monographs devoted to individual practitioners. We envision emerging from this study a more comprehensive text assembling a background to Australia's animation progress, simultaneously offering a greater theoretical consideration of original Australian animation. The Australian Background Australian cinema is said to have commenced in 1896 with visiting Frenchman, Sestier's film, Melbourne Cup - its French title Les Courses - immediately followed by a local production of documentaries (Bertrand 1989). Of particular note was The Soldiers of the Cross, produced in
... Dirk De Bruyn offers a phenomenological reading of the traumatic effects engendered by Robert... more ... Dirk De Bruyn offers a phenomenological reading of the traumatic effects engendered by Robert Breer's experimental animations. ... Andrew Buchanan and Peter Moyes hone in on the more technical aspects of animation practice. ...
Fhaanz 2008 Proceedings of the Xivth Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand Remapping Cinema Remaking History, 2009
Brakhage contents great directors cteq annotations top tens about us links archive search Tracing... more Brakhage contents great directors cteq annotations top tens about us links archive search Tracing an Original and the Law of Diminishing Returns by Dirk de Bruyn Dirk de Bruyn has been involved with personal film making as a practitioner, curator and writer in Melbourne and overseas for 30 years. He is currently teaching Digital Filmmaking at Deakin University.
Migrating by sea from Holland as an eight-year-old, Dirk de Bruyn went on to be a doyen of Austra... more Migrating by sea from Holland as an eight-year-old, Dirk de Bruyn went on to be a doyen of Australian experimental cinema. But as this intimate film reveals, his work is suffused with the trauma of migration, and the struggle to recognise himself as a ‘new Australian'. In conversation with documentarian Steven McIntyre, Dirk guides us through more than 40 years of his filmmaking: the early years exploring technique and technology, a subsequent phase of unflinching self-examination brought on by upheaval and overseas travel, and more recent projects where he attempts a fusion of personal, cultural, and historical identity. What emerges is an inspiring, rugged, and at times poignant portrait of an artist committed to self-expression and self-discovery through the medium of film. The House That Eye Live In features spectacular footage of Dirk's renowned expanded-cinema performances, and newly transferred excerpts from his extensive filmography, some of which are seen here for t...
This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, ... more This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative inter...
Dirk de Bruyn is one of Australia’s most successful and acclaimed abstract animators. It may be t... more Dirk de Bruyn is one of Australia’s most successful and acclaimed abstract animators. It may be too soon to truly call this program a ‘retrospective’ but de Bruyn’s career none-the-less spans a significant portion of the history of abstract and experimental animation in Australia. His films are as addictive as they are bold and uncompromising examples of the genre. He displays a remarkable ability to learn the lessons gifted us by earlier greats and yet produce a flowing, beautifully realised river of imagery that is all his own. His film contain, in many instances, the spirit and ghost-narratives of his own life. MIAF is thrilled to be able to present this program and the chance to have him discuss these works in person will be one of the festival highlights.
Enabled by hand-held devices, the digital image has now attained a level of mobility reminiscent ... more Enabled by hand-held devices, the digital image has now attained a level of mobility reminiscent of the impact of the transistor radio on popular music in the 1960s. Screens now dominate multiple levels of public and personal space. Light shows, hefty screens and Vjing as real-time performance define popular music events. This pervasive mobility has also regenerated activity in public, multi-screen performances of formalist, graphic imagery by film artists and delivered a renewed interest in a subjugated history that itself formed in 1960s youth culture. The computer’s domestication of avant-garde technique has elicited a response by this avant-garde’s contemporary successors through their continued use of film in performance, foregrounding the ‘perceptual as political’.
A peek into the past of an Australian experimental cinema legend. Glorious 16mm film program with... more A peek into the past of an Australian experimental cinema legend. Glorious 16mm film program with sympathetic vibrations by Jon Dale, Joel Stern, Lloyd Barrett & Joe Musgrove.
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Videos by Dirk de Bruyn
Framed by Vilem Flusser’s “Freedom of the Migrant” & “technical image” and marked a dialogue between analog and digital forms. I understood my migration from old to new technologies as an echo/replay/rehearsal of my parent’s physical migration from the old world (Europe) to the new world (Australia).
Framed by Chris Brewin’s traumatic memory model: a disturbed dialogue between Verbally Accesible Memory (VAM) and Situational Accessible memory (SAM)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life and the fragmented remembering of abuse from childhood at the hands of my grand-mother and aunts from my father's side of the family in the Netherlands, before my parents and I migrated to Australia in 1958. Please read "Dys-membering Traum A Dream" in the articles section.
Traum A Dream attempts to visually work through fragmented traumatic memories. I believe my own emphasis is both visceral and visual, articulated through a materialist aesthetic, located in relation to the film work of Peter Gidal, Kurt Kren, Marc Adrian and Robert Breer, amongst others. In this project, my interest in avant-garde film is about the methodologies that express the mechanism of denial and erasure of trauma. It is about framing and conveying such abuse's hidden ‘un-speakability'.
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in Suburban Melbourne & their impact on family life. Flicker, afterimages, chants, rants and repetitions, framed by Mcluhan’s theorizing about probes, pattern recognition, information speed-up. The visuals were structured around the sonic qualities of the performance spaces.
Phase 2: 3- 6 projector performances 2000+
The immersive quality of abuse and trauma presented physically & materially by rendering the production apparatus visible. Body performance, shadow play & sound poetry driving the flicker and manipulations using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches.
Phase 3: 360 degree projections.
A response to Covid. 360 degree projection spaces like fulldome enable an exploration of peripheral vision & shift the impact on the body of these immersive environments.
Videos by Dirk de Bruyn
24 Hour Clocks is an experimental documentary about Surveillance and the iconic Flinders Street Station in Melbourne that marks the shift from material analogue technologies associated with the British Empire and its Colonies into the contemporary digital. The presentation contrasts the 1950s role of servicing and regulating the proletariat workers through to the Station’s present tourist destination. The presentation reviews the Station’s more precarious diminished role in a diversified networked city permeated by ephemeral digital technologies and a COVID legacy.
The presentation contrasts this visible surveillance with the 1,000s of surveillance cameras littering the city and the mobile cameras carried by all those traversing this physical space on foot. The presentation analyses how these shifts in technology articulate the transformation of class structures within the local economy and documents the shift from a Proletariat Class into the Precariat. Reference will also be made to an earlier documentary, Found Found Found, discussed in and available in NECSUS in 2014.
Books by Dirk de Bruyn
Papers by Dirk de Bruyn
I voice my sampling and re-editing practices via a 1970s experimental filmmaking in which I initiated my filmmaking practice, an outsider move I now understand as a return, as re-performing my parent’s marginality in this culture. I particularly resource Peter Gidal’s 70s manifestation of materialist film (see Gidal 1989), subjugated and considered utopian and apolitical within Peter Wollen’s two avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]) but which I have argued elsewhere returns in the digital situation of information overload and image hyper-malleability to express the impact and structure of traumatic experience (de Bruyn 2012). Having finally arrived as an Australian, I reclaim my parent’s history by relating the history of my subjugated practice. I offer aspects of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as evidence of materialist film’s recall internationally, as examples of a dialogue and re-integration of the avant-garde split that Wollen imagined and facilitated, and a method for unpacking the traumatic register of the 1950s New Australian identity. In the last part of this paper Arnold’s method is used to reveal the ideologies impacting on the newly arrived migrant in the 50s. This textual analysis is performed in the re-editing of mainstream film material relating to this period of Australian history.
animations ‘research’ the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first
visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).
Framed by Vilem Flusser’s “Freedom of the Migrant” & “technical image” and marked a dialogue between analog and digital forms. I understood my migration from old to new technologies as an echo/replay/rehearsal of my parent’s physical migration from the old world (Europe) to the new world (Australia).
Framed by Chris Brewin’s traumatic memory model: a disturbed dialogue between Verbally Accesible Memory (VAM) and Situational Accessible memory (SAM)
This body-centred short film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life and the fragmented remembering of abuse from childhood at the hands of my grand-mother and aunts from my father's side of the family in the Netherlands, before my parents and I migrated to Australia in 1958. Please read "Dys-membering Traum A Dream" in the articles section.
Traum A Dream attempts to visually work through fragmented traumatic memories. I believe my own emphasis is both visceral and visual, articulated through a materialist aesthetic, located in relation to the film work of Peter Gidal, Kurt Kren, Marc Adrian and Robert Breer, amongst others. In this project, my interest in avant-garde film is about the methodologies that express the mechanism of denial and erasure of trauma. It is about framing and conveying such abuse's hidden ‘un-speakability'.
Explores the numbing qualities of urban spaces in Suburban Melbourne & their impact on family life. Flicker, afterimages, chants, rants and repetitions, framed by Mcluhan’s theorizing about probes, pattern recognition, information speed-up. The visuals were structured around the sonic qualities of the performance spaces.
Phase 2: 3- 6 projector performances 2000+
The immersive quality of abuse and trauma presented physically & materially by rendering the production apparatus visible. Body performance, shadow play & sound poetry driving the flicker and manipulations using filters, mirrors, masks and prisms and manipulating the soundtrack area with strobes and torches.
Phase 3: 360 degree projections.
A response to Covid. 360 degree projection spaces like fulldome enable an exploration of peripheral vision & shift the impact on the body of these immersive environments.
24 Hour Clocks is an experimental documentary about Surveillance and the iconic Flinders Street Station in Melbourne that marks the shift from material analogue technologies associated with the British Empire and its Colonies into the contemporary digital. The presentation contrasts the 1950s role of servicing and regulating the proletariat workers through to the Station’s present tourist destination. The presentation reviews the Station’s more precarious diminished role in a diversified networked city permeated by ephemeral digital technologies and a COVID legacy.
The presentation contrasts this visible surveillance with the 1,000s of surveillance cameras littering the city and the mobile cameras carried by all those traversing this physical space on foot. The presentation analyses how these shifts in technology articulate the transformation of class structures within the local economy and documents the shift from a Proletariat Class into the Precariat. Reference will also be made to an earlier documentary, Found Found Found, discussed in and available in NECSUS in 2014.
I voice my sampling and re-editing practices via a 1970s experimental filmmaking in which I initiated my filmmaking practice, an outsider move I now understand as a return, as re-performing my parent’s marginality in this culture. I particularly resource Peter Gidal’s 70s manifestation of materialist film (see Gidal 1989), subjugated and considered utopian and apolitical within Peter Wollen’s two avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]) but which I have argued elsewhere returns in the digital situation of information overload and image hyper-malleability to express the impact and structure of traumatic experience (de Bruyn 2012). Having finally arrived as an Australian, I reclaim my parent’s history by relating the history of my subjugated practice. I offer aspects of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as evidence of materialist film’s recall internationally, as examples of a dialogue and re-integration of the avant-garde split that Wollen imagined and facilitated, and a method for unpacking the traumatic register of the 1950s New Australian identity. In the last part of this paper Arnold’s method is used to reveal the ideologies impacting on the newly arrived migrant in the 50s. This textual analysis is performed in the re-editing of mainstream film material relating to this period of Australian history.
animations ‘research’ the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first
visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).
This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. “Found Found Found” NECSUS: Autumn, 2014. https://necsus-ejms.org/found-found-found/). Through a study of its formalist influences and strategies it is argued that it is possible to arrive at the audiovisual essay as a creative research methodology from a different practice trajectory. The originating point is the avant-garde split documented in Peter Wollen’s Two Avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]. “The two avant-gardes.” In Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, 92–114. London: Verso.), which articulated a formalist avant-garde, focusing on perceptual processes, as utopian in its extreme dismissal of the signified, as non-narrative and unreadable as political discourse. Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’ is enlisted to place such practice into a productive relationship with the audiovisual essay. This formalist cinema has already been re-read through the digital turn as producing forms of traumatic memory (de Bruyn [2014]. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.) and performing the formalist methods of surveillance technology (de Bruyn 2014. “Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival.” Senses of Cinema 70 March 2014: http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/festival-reports/structuralist-film-and-the-birth-of-surveillance-the-2013-alternativa-filmvideo-festival/.).
This story is told through a cavalcade of media forms that is of itself of interest as predictive of our media-saturated daily lives. Student protest in the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for women’s rights occurred on a number of fronts in the West but with a particular twist in occupied postwar Germany.
Casa (Super 8 B+W, Col 4 minutes 1989),
The Little Things (Super 8 B+W, Col 5 minutes 1989)
Embriato (Super 8 Colour 10 minutes1989),
MRSOSO (Super 8 B+W, Col 10 minutes 1992)
Sunset Aorta (Super 8 Colour 8 minutes 1993
Last year at IFFR, Hoolboom screened 27 Thoughts About my Father (2019), which features his own articulate ruminations on his father’s memory, who passed away in 2017. In Judy versus Capitalism, Judy Rebick’s stirring and personal voice drives the narrative and Hoolboom’s skills in shaping rhythm and organising his images to process emotion, developed over decades of film production, amplifies Judy’s story.
This program also reflects my history and presents a sprinkling of the films I experienced while I was making moving image works. Included are some of my own responses (Zoomfilm, Discs, Traum A Dream, WAP) to the marginal and invisible aesthetic and political situations I found myself in, where I was corralled with others, to eke out a creative low budget, low technology trajectory in what is and was considered a ‘lucky’ country.
Although there is a strong theme of abstraction and the materiality of film (Leading Ladies, Excerpt, Exacuate, KeepinTime Abstract) there are also works that sit at the edge of narrative (Fun Radio, Morena, E.G., WAP). These are the two avant-gardes, that for Peter Wollen were split in the 70s, but, I would argue, are re-integrated in the digital- if they ever were really that far apart. This program lists those methods of expression I had access to as a migrant in Australia. What I understand now is that I was looking for ways of articulating my exclusion viscerally and it was through methods, techniques and technologies demonstrated in these films that I needed to find it. I needed to understand and express how erasure and denial was exacted on my body in daily life. It is in this way I think that the abstract remains implicitly political.
"